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Mobile apps are open to fraud attacks

Companies that don’t take steps to secure mobile communications and transactions open themselves up to much higher levels of fraud and other types of cybercrime.
Easy Solutions has released “The Fraud Beat 2016 – Taking Pulse of Cybercrime”, a new report that identifies the most recent and sophisticated cyber-attacks impacting companies, financial institutions and consumers across the globe. The report also provides exclusive insight into the future of online attacks and the best recommended protection practices to minimize the risks and effects of targeted threats.
“As we move into 2017, the concept of digital trust will gain significant relevance as criminals are motivated to contaminate any type of digital interactions with banks and enterprises in pursuit of relevant information that will enable them to successfully launch and monetize fraudulent attacks,” says Ricardo Villadiego, CEO of Easy Solutions “In this report, our fraud experts provide a strategy and recommendations to help organisations manage and preserve that trust.
“To do so, organisations must be able to transparently deploy security and make it simple for users to integrate higher levels of protection into their online systems. It is these companies that will be the ones poised to make headlines for their business acumen, and not because they fell victim to the crafty tactics of fraud actors.”
In the report, Easy Solutions fraud experts provide analysis on what the company considers the most treacherous attacks observed this year, including search-engine ad poisoning, social media attacks, rogue mobile apps, SWIFT network attacks, ransomware, credit card breaches, synthetic identify fraud and corporate email takeover and spearphishing.
The company’s fraud experts compared device-threat analytics data from its own clients with that of 12 Fortune 500 organisations and found that those whose mobile applications lack protection features (such as multi-factor authentication or jailbreak detection) experienced four to nine times more rogue applications than companies that incorporated protection features into their mobile applications. Not surprisingly, when it comes to mobile, any kind of protection is better than none.
Easy Solutions also found that:
* Organisations not using multi-factor authentication experience three times more phishing attacks on their web portals than those who do.
* A large portion of the more than 80-million fake profiles on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are used to launch social media attacks.
* Banks that use the SWIFT system should reinforce usernames and passwords with such extra authentication factors as biometrics, push messaging, or hard or soft login tokens.
* Credit card fraud has evolved in response to new security measures such as EMV chip-and-pin cards, with card-not-present fraud spiking to new highs. Banks need to improve their anomaly detection capabilities and develop more sophisticated tools for identifying fraud patterns and checks on criteria such as IP, geolocation and transaction amount.